Movies on 9/11 hailed

The chairman of the commission that investigated the worst act of terrorism in America's history hopes the plethora of television movies, documentaries and restrospectives commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11 will do some good.

Gov. Thomas H. Kean was a consultant on ABC's two-part, five-hour movie "The Path to 9/11," which is based on the 9/11 Commission's report. And he has no hesitation about TV reliving the events.

"What I like so much about this project is it tells a story of the conspiracy, and more people will see this than will ever read our report," Kean recently told TV critics. "My hope is that if people see this and understand the plot and understand the recommendations that need to be implemented that we learned from the plot, it will be a better and safer country."

"Path" follows the plot from the first bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993 through Sept. 11, 2001. It's one of several projects that take that tack; others range from specials about the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center towers to reports on the terrorists to specials about the passengers aboard the planes the terrorists used.

Several of those involved in the shows feel Americans may already be forgetting about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I think that it's easy for everybody to sort of lose focus of what it meant, what it meant when the towers fell," said writer/producer Seth Kramer, the writer/producer of PBS's "America Rebuilds, Part II: Return to Ground Zero." "You could go outside and ask 10 people why we were attacked on 9/11 and probably get 10 different answers ... which is why we think that making documentaries about this stuff is kind of important."

Others — including Ted Koppel, who has the three-hour special "The Price of Security" on the Discovery Channel — want to make viewers think about what's happened to the country since 9/11.

"I think what you've been seeing happening over the past five years," Koppel said, "is how there has been that sort of pendulum swing away from what was almost entirely a concern about security to now a continuing concern about security, but one that is modified by a growing concern about the government's tendency to impinge on some of our civil liberties and some of our privacy."

Mary Fetchet, the founding director of Voices of September 11th — an organization of 9/11 survivors (her son was killed in the attack on the WTC) that hounded the government to investigate what went wrong — acknowledges that watching these programs can be difficult.